Facebook is rolling out fundraising tools for Safety Check to raise relief funds during a disaster

Facebook has announced a number of updates to its ‘Safety Check’ feature. The company announced that it will add ‘Fundraisers’ to the feature to make it easier for people to raise relief money after any disaster or calamity. The feature will start rolling out in the US in coming weeks.

The company has not announced any details about the international rollout of the feature. According to a blog post by Facebook, it is also expanding the Community help feature for the desktop along with all types of crisis defined by the company. The community will be able to help as soon as the Safety Switch is enabled.

Image Credit: Facebook

One small but important feature addition to this feature is the ability for the users to add a personal note to the Safety Check so that users marking themselves as safe or donating for the cause know the context of the problem or calamity.

Last but not the least, the company has added a ‘Crisis description’ to the Safety Check, where users can add the description of the crisis from NC4. The company details that NC4 is a trusted third party global crisis agency. Naomi Gleit, VP Social Good at Facebook pointed out that the feature was activated about 600 times in two years.

This comes right after user backlash at Facebook’s decision to activate ‘Safety Check’ during the Grenfell Tower fire in London, as reported by Mashable. Most users had a problem with Facebook seemingly promoting itself by activating the check for people even 4-5 miles away from the actual disaster site. They claimed that Facebook is using stress and fear to drive up engagement on its platform.